Amjad Nasser: Now Available in English

Susannah Tarbush reviews Jordanian poet Amjad Nasser's Shepherd of Solitude, the first collection of his work to appear in English. It's translated by poet Khaled Mattawa and published by Banipal Books. Tarbush argues that the volume gives English readers an insight into a major Arabic poet, his poetry marked by a fierce wit and equally fierce elegiac manner, a poet of many flavours gathered by a sharp intelligence.

Khaled Mattawa sums this sense up beautifully in his introduction, pointing out that Nasser uses the word and image of the shepherd frequently, positioning himself, as poet,

like a shepherd watching over a flock of wayward, reckless versions of himself. He gives these selves free rein to act out their crises and victories, and they in turn reveal to him various shades of the glory and folly of human nature. Their flaws recounted and noted, he shepherds them home at the end of the day and closes the stable door behind him.

Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing: Now In Business

Susannah Tarbush was at the BQFP's inaugural event in London for a salon with Ahdaf Soueif, in discussion with Peter Florence of the Hay Festival, at St Barnabas House at 1 Greek Street in the heart of literary London. If you missed the event, don't worry -- the next one will take place on 9 September, in Doha. Bloomsbury’s founder and chief executive Nigel Newton announced "the first BQFP Ramadan Iftar, featuring readings by local poets in Arabic and English” in the BQFP villa at the Qatar Foundation. For news and events, check out the BQFP website, where Arab authors can also submit a book proposal for the foundation's children's publishing program: contact the foundation on bqfp [at][ bloomsbury.com. They have just published their first book -- The Selfish Crocodile by Faustin Charles and Michael Terry -- in both Arabic and English (read more in Tarbush's blog), and theya re looking for further titles which will be launched and distributed in Qatar on World Book Day.

Banipal 35: New Writing in Arabic -- and Dutch!

There's a new issue out now of Banipal, the UK-based magazine of Arabic literature -- and Issue 35 comes with a twist: the focus is on writers of Arab origin writing in Dutch, with ten writers including Palestinian-Dutch poet Ramsay Nasr, who is the Netherlands' Poet Laureate (an elected office). As Susannah Tarbush notes in her preview of the issue for the Saudi Gazette:

Nasr’s poems in Banipal 35 include “What’s left: A poem about empty dishes”; he was asked to write this poem shortly after becoming poet laureate, to mark the exhibiting at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam of the painting “Woman Holding a Balance” by the 17th century Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer. Some of Nasr’s work is overtly political, such as “The subhuman and his habitat” about Palestinians in the West Bank, from where his father originated.

All but two of the other writers are of Moroccan origin, complementing the issue's focus on new writing from Morocco (including poets Hassan Najmi and Ouidad Benmoussa, who were prevented by the Home Office from taking part in a Banipal-sponsored UK reading tour). The other two, Rada Sukkar and Rodaan Al-Galidi, are of Iraqi origin, represented by excerpts of their novels (respectively) The Treasure Room of Babylonia and Thirsty River, which will be published this autumn, in Luzette Strauss' translation, by newcomer on the UK translation scene Aflame Books.

To keep up with news from Banipal, you can now join their Facebook group. For Aflame's news, follow their RSS feed.

More on Beirut39 and the case of the disappearing judges

The Tanjara has an interview with Alaa al-Aswany that explores his reasons for resigning as chair of the judging panel. Aswany commented that

“One day after I accepted their offer, I received a list of 90 names of young writers who were candidates for the competition. I later learned that those names had been chosen by the literary magazine Banipal, which issued its own selection."

This narrowed the original criteria of the competition, which had declared it was open to all writers under 40 of Arabic origin. al-Aswany also felt the award had been compromised by a lack of awareness in the Arab world:

“In Egypt no one was aware of the mere existence of this literary contest, except people with good connections in the cultural field and a bunch of journalists".

The deadline for candidacies has been extended to August 24th and the nominations page remains open to all.

What's going on at Beirut39?

The Tanjara has a lead: an article from Al-Hayat [Ar] concerning Alaa al-Aswany's resignation as chair of the jury. It's a follow-up to her interview with the author after the recent publication of his short story collection, Friendly Fire.

Books Across Borders: Beirut39 at Hay; the Bubisher in Western Sahara

As well as the Free the Word festival taking place in New York, there's news of a new addition to the summer festival line-up from the innovative folks at the Hay festival, a celebration of Arabic literature at this year's festival to recognise Beirut's status as UNESCO World Capital of the Book 2009. The Tanjara has curated event listings for panels and readings involving Arab writers. And there's still time to enter - or nominate someone for - the beirut39 project to find 39 writers of Arab heritage under 39.

And in Western Sahara, a mobile library is bringing joy and/of literacy to children in refugee camps. The Bubisher, named after a good-luck bird, is a bus carrying books for a reading plan, according to Global Voices. The bus, of course, has a blog written by its originator, Spanish publisher Gonzalo Moure. As for what's on the bus, Global Voices quotes Kalandra blog: I

n addition to books in Castillian Spanish donated by publishing houses like Kalandra, Bubisher has a collection of books for children and youth in the Arabic language strengthening the ties with multiculturalism.

You can become a Bubisher friend and circulate, translate and promote their materials.

New Writing from Yemen and Upper Egypt

Yemeni Observer reports on a panel discussion about new Yemeni literature, including writers Ali al-Muqri; topics of discussion included the impact of globalisation on Yemen. In the Saudi Gazette, Susannah Tarbush has a review of Tales from Dayrut by Mohamad Mustagab, revealing for the first time in English

the strange, distinctive world of rural Upper Egypt with its poverty, superstition, vendettas, honor killings, rumors and folklore.

She also has an update on the 'Arabic Booker' (free excerpts in English with The National!) on her blog.

Poems for Palestine: From the Internet

Michael Smith's 2008 Free Verse supplement, featuring selections from Mahmoud Darwish's "A State of Siege (fragments)", with its beautiful, compelling observation:

This siege will last until we teach our enemy
selections of pre-Islamic poetry.

Other poets featured are Ghassan Zaqatan, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Samih Al-Qasim, Sharif S. Elmusa, Fadwa Tuqan, Abd al-Aziz al-Maqalih, Samer Abu Hawwash, Naomi Shihab Nye, Seema Atalla, Saud el-Asadi, Izzidin al-Manasrah, Jihad Hudaib, Omar Shabbanah, Ahmad Dahbour, Anas al-Ayla, Mohammad H Ghanaiem, Nathalie Handal, Khaled Abdallah, Walid Khazendar, Youssef Abd al-Aziz, Ghazi al-Theeba, Khairi Mansour, and Mourid Barghouti.



John Berger reads from Mahmoud Darwish's "Mural."

And Ghassan Kanafani's "Letter from Gaza", written more than 50 years ago:

"In the middle of the year, that year, the Jews bombarded the central district of Sabha and attacked Gaza, our Gaza, with bombs and flame-throwers. That event might have made some change in my routine, but there was nothing for me to take much notice of; I was going to leave. this Gaza behind me and go to California where I would live for myself, my own self which had suffered so long. I hated Gaza and its inhabitants. Everything in the amputated town reminded me of failed pictures painted in grey by a sick man. Yes, I would send my mother and my brother's widow and her children a meagre sum to help them to live, but I would liberate myself from this last tie too, there in green California, far from the reek of defeat which for seven years had filled my nostrils. The sympathy which bound me to my brother's children, their mother and mine would never be enough to justify my tragedy in taking this perpendicular dive. It mustn't drag me any further down than it already had. I must flee!"

Read the full letter on the tanjara.

Reading Egypt

The Guardian's Book Blog are travelling around the world via literature, and it's Egypt's turn. Post your suggestions and thoughts here. You can add new discoveries to the Atlas here.

[Updated 2 Dec]

the tanjara posts about the Guardian's literary tourism (aren't we loving the photo of the very contemporary Pyramids?) with some pertinent observations and questions about how the Guardian's tour functions:

So far, the blog entry on Egypt has attracted only 17 comments (some of which weren't on Egyptian literature, but suggested a next stop on the 'tour'), much fewer than the 45 for Portugal, the previous stop, Nigeria (42), Australia (116 comments), Ireland (213). Of course it's not really appropiate to compare interest, as indicated by comments, in relatively newly available Egyptian fiction with that in literature from Anglophone countries.
Egypt was chosen as a destination by readers of the blog, but there was a miniscule number of votes. It got 2 votes, tied with the same number for a combined destination of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. As Egypt had been shortlisted a few times previously it was the final choice. Surely Moroccan literature (including poetry) is 'present' enough to merit inclusion in its own right rather than only as part of a general Maghreb entry. Or, if one insists on a general North African entry, why not expand to include Libya

So there's lots of space to make your opinion heard (unusual on a Guardian blog!) and put the names of classics and exciting new novels out there... Great to see Bahaa Taher getting attention alongside Naguib Mahfouz, and also Khalid al-Khamissy.

If you're lucky enough to be in Cairo, Kamal Rohaym is reading from his novel "Ayam al-shataat" on Wednesday 8th December at the last Sphinx Agency salon of the year. Rohaym won a prize for the first novel, "Quloub munhaka" (The Muslim Jew), which is being translating into German at the moment. The next big thing?!

Girls of Riyadh Go to Dublin & Samir El-Youssef in Belgium

Susannah Tarbush reports in the Saudi Gazette that Rajaa Alsanea's The Girls of Riyadh has been longlisted for the Dublin/IMPAC award for fiction, which was won last year by Canadian-based Lebanese writer Rawi Hage's YA novel De Niro's Game. Tarbush notes that, along with Alaa Al-Aswany, Alsanea and Hage

have broken through into the Western literary mainstream, which has been a stimulus for Arab literature. Publishers are increasingly interested in publishing translations of Arabic writing, and are on the lookout for new Arab authors who may have mass readership appeal.

She also flags up Saqi's publication of David Tresilian's A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature; her discussion of the book suggests some of the tensions between the EuroWestern emphasis on mass market popular publishing and the current practice and status of literature in the Arabic world, according to Tresilian, who sees:

three main trends on the contemporary Arab literary scene: a weariness with politics, a growth in the number of women writers, and a related emphasis on individual experience at the expense of larger public themes. A further development has been regional writing, as exemplified by Nubian writers and by the Libyan Ibrahim al-Koni whose novels are set among the Tuareg people.

Recently there has been a turning away from European literary models and towards elements from the pre-modern literary heritage and from the oral and popular culture. But ominously there has also been a growing intolerance of literary expression generally, “which has made what was always perhaps a minority activity into one that is now that of a sometimes embattled minority.”

Alsanea's novel, however, points to a fourth trend that mediates between what Tresilian perceives as a turning away from literature as popular expression: as a novel based on, and presented like, an email listserv, Girls of Riyadh is one of a growing number of novels (like Being Abbas El-Abd and The Poison Tree that use the popularity of new media communications as a form and forum for fiction, resulting in popular - and in all three cases, taboo- and genre-busting - novels with both regional and international presence.

Evidence: the IMPAC nomination for Alsanea's novel came, according to Tarbush, from a librarian in Warsaw.

And Tarbush is spot-on in drawing attention to the raised international profile of Arabic literature, although some authors pursue a different tack from Alsanea's gossipy, technologically-astute take on Sex and the City, which explores gendered double standards of life in Saudi Arabia, but also implies a gradual change (seconded, as the NYT reports, by the appearance of the first female Saudi rock band, The Accolade). Over at Words Without Borders, Arnon Grunberg catches London-based Lebanese author Samir El-Youssef in a humorous mood in Antwerp. El-Youssef's second novel A Treaty of Love is bleakly romantic, but in Antwerp he proves adept at turning his mordant view of life to stand-up (or rather, sit-down comedy).

Alive! Blogging and the Resurrection of the Author

Susannah Tarbush reviews Robin Yassin-Kassab's The Road to Damascus, and draws on the author's 'qunfuz' blog - and specifically a recent post about his wife's decision to wear the hijab - to draw parallels between the author and his main character. The article appeared in an edited version in Observer Woman magazine (and on the Guardian website) on November 02, 2008.

It's a small detail, perhaps -- a reviewer linking a perhaps common thought about a book (that it's timely, contemporary, that the author knows whereof he speaks) to a piece of the author's non-fiction autobiographical writing. But it's also a giant leap: a return to the idea of the living author, whose bodily, historical presence and experience might just have something to do with his or her writing. It's a thought that hardly comes as a shock to most readers -- after all, there are author bios on the flap of every book (and sometimes extended interviews and reading guides, often with biographical information, included at the end of the book), many authors also practice a lucrative sideline in op-ed or cultural journalism, and some are even gossiped-about celebrities (and some celebrities have become authors).

But the academy pronounced the author dead in the 1960s -- a profoundly liberating move for critical reading, releasing the critic from the burden of deciphering (the only possible) meaning as intended by the author. But as many feminist theorists have pointed out, that revelation happened at exactly the moment that people were starting to look critically at exactly who got to be an author, and realising that it was mainly white, upper- and middle-class, middle-aged men. As the end of colonialism, the spread of education, and new technological revolutions in publishing made the act of writing more available to the silent majority, untold stories both global and local began to translate -- for the first time -- into print, often closely hewn from the author's experience of a life that had not been described in fiction.

The internet has made publishing and storytelling even more immediate, with the proliferation of blogs (check out toot for a bewildering and wonderful range of Arabic blogging voices, and Anthony Loewenstein's excellent book The Blogging Revolution for an introduction to further voices, and a serious consideration of what this explosion in communications means for goverment, media and global culture). As well as increasing the number of voices, the internet increases the speed with which they can speak up, and with which readers can access them. In the past, readers might have waited much longer for a memoiristic piece by Yassin-Kassab that allowed them to make an incidental, but profound, connection between the events of his life while he was writing and the events of the novel he wrote.

On her blog the tanjara, starbush (who also reports on lots of author events where living, breathing authors meet their readers) is recognising what readers have always known: the author is palpably alive in the text. That doesn't mean we have to read the book as the writer wants us to, or read only for the things the writer tells us about him- or herself -- but it allows us to connect the book -- politically, emotionally, culturally -- to the moment in which we, too, are alive. It personalises the process of creating fiction, drawing us to look at our world, to think differently about aspects we may take for granted -- to think *inventively* about them, about their stories -- and that's part of the excitement (as well as political value and social justice, according to a recent University of Manchester/LSE study that showed novels can best communicate global dilemmas such as poverty) of reading fiction.

PEN Atlas on the tanjara

Journalist Susannah Tarbush, who blogs at the tanjara, gives a shout-out to the Atlas on her blog, saying that

the site clearly has the makings of a valuable online community and resource base on Arab literature

and the blog

is gathering momentum as a useful source of news, views and links relating to Arab literature.

Saif-Ghobash Banipal Prize in full

Susannah Tarbush, who blogs as the tanjara, has posted her Saudi Gazette article on the Saif Ghobash-Banipal prize, with full details of the judges' citations for Fady Joudah's winning translation of Mahmoud Darwish's The Butterfly's Burden, his reading of "Not as a Foreign Tourist Does", and of the runner-up and highly-commended titles:

Ghassan Nasr was the runner-up with his translation of the late Palestinian writer Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s last novel The Journals of Sarab Affan (Syracuse University Press). In the judges’ view: “As is to be expected with the writings of this poet-novelist, the Arabic text is couched in language of exquisite beauty, and Ghassan Nasr succeeds admirably in transferring the nuances of the original to an English version that is a pleasure to read.”

Nancy Roberts’ translation of Egyptian novelist Salwa Bakr’s The Man from Bashmour (American University in Cairo Press) was highly commended. The jury was “deeply impressed by Bakr’s courageous novelistic exploration of Egypt’s complex relationship with its Christian (Coptic) community during the 9th century AD.” The text uses complex levels of discourse, “and the translation project has therefore been a significant challenge, one that has been met with great success by the translator.”

Describing Joudah's translation of Darwish, judge Roger Allen set a high bar for translators of poetry:

The English versions of the poems “replicate, deliberately so, the structures of the original poems that parallel them on the opposite page, and yet they can be read in their English forms as wonderful transfers of the images and music of the Arabic poems. It goes without saying that this is a major achievement.”

Elizabeth Bachner writes of the desire to engage in the "acrobatic" art of translation - as a writer and reader - when discussing Anne Carson's Grief Lessons, a translation of four Euripides plays. Her powerful description of the translation - kind of a whirlwind met on a knife-edge - applies to Joudah's meeting with Darwish as well.

If translation in any form is a beautiful, treacherous and radical art -- a bit like alchemy, or shape-shifting, or dancing, or dying, or writing poems -- then translating the classics is more beautiful, and more treacherous, and more radical. It’s a kind of epistemological time travel. You have to convey, wholly and purely, the writer’s way of expressing and understanding the world. You are thrust into a vortex of inexact equations and surreal paradoxes. In transforming someone’s words, you risk destroying them, turning them into a pile of babble or ashes or dust. I say this as someone who writes in only one language -- in the translation world, I am a limbless girl watching the ballet. It makes me weep. I can feel how to pirouette with my phantom limbs.